Archive for category Groksuckers

I think that catastrophic levels of psychological projection must be catching.

As I mentioned recently, when Kim Duclos decided to try to help a certain gay-hating Evangelical in his battle to keep me from criticizing the maniacal bullshit he continually flings into cyberspace, it quickly occurred to her to tip off another of my haters, the Granite Grok consortium of perpetually livid right-wingers in New Hampshire, to what was afoot.

It seems like none of these three parties is capable of expressing satisfaction about anyone or anything without their words being a painfully obvious indictment of their own shortcomings.

I have a history with Ed Naile. I don’t blame him for not liking me. He is a muckraker extraordinaire and utterly dishonest in how he conducts himself, and I’ve offered my insights about him a coupleof times on this blog. I understand why this has upset him, and why he was quick to seize on the me-vs.-gay-bashing-Evangelical situation when Kim reached out to him. It’s not like him to be remotely concerned with accuracy, so the other day he decided to just fire off a bunch of disjointed words from his addled little forebrain.

Make that a psychiatric ward. Or a pathological liars’ convention. Or a self-help group for people who need to vent about who’s to blame for their failures in life: Liberals, faggots, people who can function in everyday life without begging or resorting to crude sexual acts, etc.

Wait. In one paragraph, I’ve just described my view of the Internet lately.

Think of this post as the prologue of a novel you would only read if you were bored in an airport and wanted to feel both better about yourself and worse about humanity at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

Cynical though I may appear, I can’t stand defeatist and vacuous arguments of the form, “Z is inevitable owing to a variety of causes, so there’s no reason to eliminate known cause Y.”

I shared an apartment with six other people my junior year of college, two women and four men. This story is not going anywhere close to where you assholes think it is. We five menfolk were collectively intemperate at times when it came to dousing our minds with liquid and botanical intoxicants, and we were also basically kids. So the downstairs was usually somewhere between messy and post-apocalyptic.

I, the neatnik of the bunch (hey, even Trump has staff members someone somewhere thinks of as bright), was one of the two residents who regularly tried cleaning up the place. (The women were not slobs, but they also never stayed downstairs when they were home, so the indoor landfill may as well have been in a different apartment.) One day, three of my roommates walked in just after I’d spent an hour getting the dishes, beer cans and bottles, plates, boxes, discarded newspapers, and dead rodents (OK, it wasn’t that bad) out of the house or into their proper places. The first thing my roommate Brian did when he noticed was zing a bottle cap across the room with an expert flick of his thumb and forefinger. It landed behind a couch I’d just dug out.Read the rest of this entry »

The greatest thing about unintentional irony is that its power to amuse is immune to the sands of time.

We live, of course, in an era in which every slack-minded crusader with Internet access seems to think that his frantic and delusional ideas about politics, religion and life in general merit a personal blog. This has boosted the number of people publicly expressing thoughts that are not only profoundly stupid but also magnificently oblivious to levels no observer could have predicted even twenty years ago. Nevertheless, every new addition to the canon of “Look at the pile of chocolate it looks like I stepped in! Why does it stink?” is just as entertaining as the ones preceding it. If nothing else, these actors are largely insulated from uncomfortable emotions such as shame and embarrassment, because they lack the intellectual candlepower to see how badly off the mark their shots invariably fall.

Since you visit the Internet, you’re surely aware that it features a colossal army of jabbering fools whose self-appointed role is to tirelessly clutter the Web with a staggering amount of fact-starved and barely decipherable material every day.

One of the many silver linings of this inexhaustible supply of really, really dumb bloggers is that morons offer excellent examples of the phenomenon of cognitive bias. We all indulge in this practice, but unsophisticated thinkers cannot see their own cognitive biases (hello, Dunning! Meet Kruger!) so they have no motivation to conceal them and probably couldn’t even if they tried.

My one-stop shop for what the dumbest right-wingers in America are thinking, Granite Grok, is biased against atheism, gay- and transgender-friendly legislation, immigrants, minorities, global warming, taxation, and educated people. Not because they have evaluated any of these things objectively on their merits — such a task would be too Herculean for them to even ponder — but because they believe that as “conservatives” they are supposed to automatically categorically reject a well-defined array of issues and concepts. Read the rest of this entry »

First of all, I should explain what I mean by by an ersatz Christian. To me, this describes anyone who ignores the idea that Christianity — despite the wreck it’s been turned into in both recent and less-recent periods in world history, the methodically violent and otherwise destructive directives in the Old Testament, the fact that the being its the core is undoubtedly mythical — is supposed to be a force for good. It is supposed to be about forgiveness, humanity, humility, equality, and other outstanding human traits and states of mind.

Now, many atheists may understandably suggest I am being overly accommodating by suggesting that Christians who say and do stupid things, especially when those things have scriptural justification, are not genuine Christians — that I am indulging in a “no true Scotsman” logical fallacy. Perhaps, but the fact is that I do know Christians, more than a few of them, who so in fact have no use for the divisive LGBT bullshit or the shoehorning of creationism into public schools or the mindless opposition to things like embryonic stem-cell research and Planned Parenthood Gardasil on religious grounds. They are generous and kind, often more so than I will ever be, and these people are the ones I choose to view Christians. The noisy louts are the feminism’s answer to feminist women who really do hate men and position themselves as women’s advocates almost solely on this platform, or the skeptical community’s counterpart to people who consider themselves roundly rational simply because they make the facile choice to not believe in the existence of deities.

Anyway, that digression leaves me looking at yet another shitburst from a bottom-of-the-barrel right-wing squawking head and self-described Evangelical Christian, Skip Murphy. Read the rest of this entry »

It must be nice, in a sense, to be sufficiently simple-minded to believe that every analogy, comparison and analysis you create or borrow — even when every last one is a dismal logical failure — is are not only coherent, but clever. (On top of that, fart jokes and Bazooka Joe comics are, no doubt, a never-ending gift of titillation to abject simpletons.) One such trope that is unlikely to disappear is “If we’re evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?” This is the kind of outburst that, despite being inexcusably stupid on multiple levels, can cause whole congregations to erupt in wild, heartfelt applause.

And on the topic of self-reinforcing inanity, I just read this in one of several manufacturing plants of self-contained electronic ketamine that I really should quit frequenting:

No, really, I just read this sentiment and it’s not an intentional joke.

This counter to the “One in five female college students has been raped” trope may well be the dumbest thing I have seen the blinkered jackwad labeled Skip Murphy write yet, and because his chief mission in life is churning out the screeds of a benighted jackwad, the competition for this dubious honor is extraordinarily fierce. If you’re a runner, think of trying to come up with the most inspiring race or racing moment in the career of Haile Gebrselassie, and you get a sense of how difficult it is to properly stratify the sodden turds in the Granite Grok verbal sewage stream.

Another sine qua non of being a right-wingnut is refusing to embrace positive findings if a Democratic president stands to take any credit for them. GraniteGrok now has a post claiming that the estimated 14.4 million jobs the U.S. has added in the past six years don’t mean much:

“[T]hat job growth is stretched over almost six full years, during which time the working age population grew by 15.8 million. In that respect, we’ve lost ground on jobs under Obama … Continued growth is good but ONLY if it keeps up with population growth … it is clear, simply by results, that the Obama Administration’s actions (based on socialist / Statists philosophy) have come up way short.”

Skip is talking out of his ass, which has to be crippled by pseudo-laryngitis by now.

Is dipshits squaring off against morons, much like the street-fight scene in the original Anchorman.

This is a textbook display of blaming the woman victim of male aggression, right down to the guy doing the blaming being an inbred-looking halfwit in his sixties who still thinks yo-momma jokes and dragging people’s girlfriends into petty Internet wars are not only clever but an effective means of chasing off your betters when you have unwisely picked fights with them.

While it’s amusing to watch the misplaced triumph of creationists after lobbing a nonsense challenge at an atheist and getting no answer, be sure not to give short shrift to the garbage that some abortion opponents come up with. For example:

“If human life doesn’t begin at conception, can you please explain how human life is possible absent conception?”

Not surprisingly, this is what this passes for a “Gotcha!” question among these fools: Two strawmen for the price of one, or if you prefer, a flawed premise coupled to a non-sequitur. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure why it’s so hard for even low-wattage thinkers to see the problem with shit like this:

You have the freedom to agree with me. Else you are a homophobic, misogynistic, xenophobic, transphobix, racist bigot. How DARE you don’t want to belong to our monoculture!!!!

Since the writer is not in danger of being mistaken for Mark Twain or even Ted Nugent, I will spell out that this is an attempt at sarcasm, and that in this attempt, Skip Murphy is trying mightily to express the wildly unoriginal idea that some people (in this case college students, but he means liberals in general) simply don’t want to entertain alternatives to their crazy, belligerent nonsense. No, it’s worse than that — those liberals are the REAL bigots for calling people out!!!!

Someone really could turn mocking the stupidity posted on just this one blog into a full-time job, if there were money to be made in mocking nameless dingbats.

Like all right-wing echo-chambers, this one is characterized by the big three traits of confused and angry Americans: Lying, delusional belief systems, and hypocrisy. At times, though, bursts of incidental honesty provide a few cheap laughs.

It’s fine that not everyone cares to exercise for the sake of fun or health or sport. But why anyone on a blog populated by visibly unfit individuals would actually malign physical activity for the sake of activity would be a mystery if the grisly lack of self-awareness of these bloggers wasn’t already well established.

The entire post is nothing more than a quote and a picture of a random younger guy using an elliptical trainer. The first line of the quote is “Physical work without producing something is alien to my mind.”

To each her own, I guess; to me, expending the physical work of writing words without producing a single useful observation is a far more profligate waste of time, since it won’t make you fitter or leaner or sharper.

Every now and then, I come across a fifth-degree right-winger who incessantly let fly with contemptuous right-wing blather, yet for whatever reason likes to claim that he or she is in the political middle.

I’ve already given one example here recently; Ed Naile, a registered Democrat from New Hampshire, spends virtually all of his boundless free time complaining about phantom examples of vote fraud by Democrats and other leftist solecisms, such as literacy, educational attainment, resisting racism and sexism wherever possible, and not substituting firearms for the ability to achieve an erection.

You have to love it when someone writes “Facts – not ideology – determine reality” on a blog populated by delusional bigots in the same post in which he rallies behind a load of bullshit about the evils of transgenderism excreted by a “medical” organization that is actually a group of conservative Christians using a convincing-sounding name (see: Center for Medical Progress) to promote ideology rather than facts.

For reference, the American College of Pediatricians was founded in 2002 and has perhaps 200 members; the American Academy of Pediatrics, on the other hand, was founded in 1930 and has a membership of approximately 64,000. Physicians in the latter group have ample reason to consider those in the former group a bunch of less-than-shrewd muckrakers and liars.

This is the worst aspect of these so-called Christian online gangs: They target the most credulous and toxic people out there. The guy who wrote this post is a mindless shitbird who would be happy to spread nastiness like this even if he knew it was ill-conceived, but in this case I’m sure that he’s merely been duped.

This, of course, is just one more example of an ineluctable aspect of faith in 21st-century America: Every day, countless people lie in order to promote Christianity, a religion that explicitly commands its followers not to lie. Does anyone else find this a little fucked up?

That’s not the most gracious of post titles, but I might as well try my hand at clickbait. Since I last spent a significant amount of time blogging — and it’s been a solid five years or more — all of the cool bloggers, along with the far greater number of riotously expendable ones, have found new ways to attract site traffic. Obnoxious or contentious post titles have always been a part of the scheme, but now that there are far more blogpiles to choose from, a lot of people have upped the clickbait ante.

None of which is to say that this post isn’t about dumb, ugly men, as it assuredly is. More than that, though, it’s about irony. The sort of giddy, high-caliber irony that arises when people have no capacity whatsoever to keep themselves in check though self-appraisal. Irony in onion-like layers, complete with the potential for tears.Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone who uses the phrase “let the people decide” with regard to the vacant SCOTUS seat, like this guy does, is advertising either shameless dishonesty or a mental deficiency or a combination of these. (In this case, based as much on the author’s mini-bio as on this one essay, I suspect that both factors are at work. He refers to “the current president’s constant barrage against guns and gun ownership,” a purported salvo that seems to have passed unnoticed outside of the Dumberdome.*)

A refresher for those with infantile views of the U.S. Constitution: The U.S. President is elected by U.S. citizens, and in turn that President is tasked with nominating justices to the Supreme Court. That’s as much of a say as “the people” get to have in the nomination process. By now, all but maybe eight people in the United States know this — even the most abject Yosemite Sam Party types cannot stave off reality entirely — but that doesn’t mean that any of the right-wingers are obligated to admit it.

Another piece of fruit from the garden of obvious: If the current President were a Republican and had named another far-right judge to replace Antonin Scalia immediately after that bloated gasbag finally went to Jesus, not one of these neoconservatives in the Rick Manning camp, from Mitch McConnell on down to every blinkered hypocrite posting on shitblogs like Granite Grok, would be saying a word about what “the people” want. “People” in this case is just lazy code for “Right-wing douchebags.”

…in the same way my right to vote in November will have been violated if I swerve into a brick wall on purpose on my way to the polls and never make it there.

Look, if you really think that Trump was shafted by the happenings in Chicago the other night, please stop reading and eat a footlong strychnine sub and put yourself out of America’s misery right now, and if you know anyone else who thinks like you do, don’t be shy about sharing.

For the rest of you: It’s surreal, isn’t it? Not just the unprecedented sight of rally after presidential-campaign rally being torn apart by increasingly serious eruptions of violence, but also the response to these events by the staggeringly blinkered assholes of the United States. Despite Donald Trump consciously, vociferously, repeatedly and gleefully fomenting this bullshit — which, I hope you’ll agree, is no longer funny even in the macabre way some of Trump’s previous public fuckery was funny — there are people who not only rush to absolve Trump of any and all blame for the very series of ugly confrontations he has invited, but have the unbridled skull-fucking, dick-twisting audacity to blame Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or both. (Did I forget to add that these craven, ruddy-necked weasels are blaming the protesters as well? I guess I see no need to state the overly obvious.)

Especially when they belong to groups like “Pro-Gun New Hampshire,” as does Ed Naile of Hillsboro, N.H., whom I mentioned here last month. Ed has continued his sabbatical from male modeling to allow himself more time to pester me whenever I’ve made appearances in the comments at Granite Grok, a far-right verbal leach field on which about 37 proud semi-literate gasbags, Ed himself among them, have posting privileges. Ed also blogs about his and others’ many fruitless attempts to catch vote thieves at an obscure site called “NH Insider,” which I can only read as “NH Inbreeder” for obvious reasons.

Did you know that the political left is aiming to selectively abort as many potential black people as possible, preferably in squalid conditions, and that the chief reason for the recent unprecedented rise in abortion-clinic closings is because the Democrats who run such places refuse to conform to the ultra-high standards of women’s healthcare set by Republicans? I know that sounds weird, since liberals *also* want as many ethnic minorities casting illegal ballots as possible, and also because Republican politicians often say silly things about women and their ladyparts, but it’s true! I read it here.

Watch me get thrashed in the comments section by one of the resident geniuses. Hey, I’m a big boy, I can take a licking from my rhetorical betters and learn from it.

Doc Bushwell is busy with other activities but continues to lend a moniker to this backwater of a blog. Jim is an engineering professor with a fondness for running shoes and drumsticks; and Kevin Beck is a self-exiled member of the clan who refuses to stay gone.